


War Room

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Reylux Network Prompt Exchange, pillowtalk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:20:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6695104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey, the unyielding apprentice, has finally discovered the soft, vulnerable, and very definitively human parts of the First Order. She bites down. </p>
<p>Written for this reyluxnetwork exchange prompt: "after a passionate night together - rey, hux and kylo share some meaningful pillow talk, discussing the future of their relationship and it’s implications in the first order and what Snoke might think."</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Room

**Author's Note:**

> haha sorry that this reads kinda weird i just had to finish this before i exploded

Rey fists a hand in the the sheets and wonders, in a secondary kind of way, what First Order linens are made of. They’re gray as ash and twice as soft, rippling and mercurial as the waters of some unkind sea; she thinks of a great, grey-wooly beast, hunkering low in dew, or grass, or some not-sand softness, waiting benignly to be shorn. Or something like that—nothing on Jakku was ever really _made_ , per say, only stolen, the same rags passed from back to back and bleached under that same sun until they were tatters. She only has a hazy idea of how weaving might work.

She nearly laughs; the sheets are synthetic, anyways. Machine-stitched, recycled.

 

Hux smacks his lips and rolls over. His forearm rubs against hers, and it’s a warm, sticky feeling.

 

It occurs to Rey that officers might be given better stuff. She doesn’t know if they get a premium when it comes to these things, doesn’t care and can’t tell, regardless; the sheets of her little bunk still sing against her skin when she sleeps in them, softer than anything she has ever felt. She had slept on the floor for the first two weeks; nothing else made sense. But Rey’s body feels slippery now, smooth, shucked free of some old husk. Dark robes and dark linens and dark, cave-mouth spaces that have forced her eyes to adjust. She had forgotten the _brightness_ , just for a minute, didn’t remember until she had looked in the mirror last week and traced the crinkled crows feet around her eyes from squinting into the sun. They’re fading. The First Order is a catacomb of sorts; Rey knows that if she went to Jakku now, she’d be blind.

 

Her master shuffles on her other side, huge, calloused hands resting gently on his breast and belly as he sleeps.

 

What a strange place. A great, chromed-up behemoth of an empire, mined from the glittering ores of planet systems too far-stretched to be anything but alien. The click-catch of a blaster, plastisteel, durasteel, the way that Phasma’s greaves shine in the lamp-light of diagnostic readouts. Going from the relics of a superpower to its vanguard has been a whiplash-fast sort of thing that’s left Rey reeling, but also knowing. Understanding. She walks the halls of the Finalizer and it’s an afterimage that’s just two frames off from the guts of the star destroyers she pillaged, back in that old life. The empire of the known universe, regardless of era, seems to have preferred layouts and favored designs, whether their floors are knee deep in derelict dust or glinting onyx with the anal fixation of a 24-hour sanitation detail.

Hux and Ren were surprised, at first. She could read it on their faces. Didn’t know or understand how deftly she took to navigating her home (not new home—Jakku was something else, she knows that now. This, now, is just _home_ ), and she wanted to tell them: I have worked these halls since I was able to grasp a weapon in my tiny hands. But that felt a little too private; things are hard here, too, down and down, through and through, and Rey has always spent her entire life wanting to match until—this part. The part where the First Order is no longer so unyielding, where Rey is in bed with two men, who, though they might both claim otherwise, are decidedly, utterly _soft_.

It’s terrifying, what they’ve done to her. She woke up this morning thinking of sand, thinking of Snoke, and remembering the softness of Hux’s hair spilling over he knuckles. So she does what she knows how to in the face of this fear: revels in their vulnerability and, with the exact same ruthlessness she’d use to bury two thumbs into fruit-flesh, digs into it.

 

“What’s he going to do?” she says to the ceiling. Her voice doesn’t carry very far, sinking into the thick carpet, the mattress.

“Are we going to die?” she asks. This is not arbitrary; Snoke is more a negative space than an actual person, thing, whatever, at this point, but that doesn’t mean he’s not _there_.

It’s interesting to watch them rise. Ren’s eyes open instantly, his consciousness doing the organic equivalent of a droid logging on to its core systems, the sense of him butting up against hers in their bond with an irritated _twang_.

Hux is slower. “Mmm,” he rumbles, rubbing at his eyes. All the years have sloughed off him, like dust from the shoulders of a long-stagnant freighter. It might be cruel to steal that from him so readily.

So she turns to Ren instead, who is taking stock of their current predicament in the same quiet, hopeless way a man might survey Armageddon. “You fucked me,” she says, her eyes and voice wide with wonder, and asks again if they are going to die for it. What a scorching thing it had been between the three of them, how sweltering, how lovely; she still shivers at the thought of it. They wear her bites, even now.

“Rey—“ His voice is so deep. The whole of her hungry consciousness leaps on him immediately.

_I can smell his breath on the back of your neck,_ she tells him, hotwired straight through their bond _. I feel what you feel, remember?_ He stills at that.

For Hux’s bond-deaf sake: “You know him. Or you tell yourself you do, at least. What’s our bounty?’

Hux, for his part, considers this, while Ren keeps looking at her through sleep-puffed eyes, an expression of vague distaste legible in his face.

“I can’t imagine that he would like this,” she says, and a thought occurs to her. “Do you think he even remembers what sex is like?” _How good it is?_ “Do you think he’s ever even—done it?”

“ _Stars,_ Rey!” Ren hisses, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes to quell the image at the same time that Hux mutters something that sounds suspiciously like _oh gods, no_.

They shift and scumble as Rey watches, awkwardly caught in this strange, utterly vulnerable space somewhere between the painfully soft sheets, and she realizes: they didn’t think about this.

She exclaims out loud at the sheer idea of it, something wordless and high. _They didn’t think!_

Or they didn’t think, and now this thing between them had just--- happened. She, scavenger, the one who fought an entire fucking planet and _won_ , has prized apart the soft, foolish space between their legs and partaken. They write myths about stupidity like this.

 

She wants to scream.

 

She rolls over to her master, instead. He’s very concertedly not looking at her face, and when he tenses as she lies up against his chest, she half expects him to throw her to the ground. He doesn’t. She wraps her hands around his biceps, just in case. She lays an ear against the great, warm mount of his ribcage, trying to suss out his nervousness in the most basic way she knows how. _What are you thinking, how are you feeling?_ Also: _Am I alone?_ He isn’t anxious, paradoxically; his heartbeat trawls on.

She lay there for a while, his heart beating a pipeline rhythm straight to her own, watching as Hux lights a cigarette, because it’s taking her a minute to figure out why her head is pounding hard enough to burst. But then, starburst-bright, she does: it’s protectiveness. Possessiveness, the same way she’d scatter steelpeckers from the sun-soaked flank of her little wreck, had kneed a merchant in the jaw, once, for dipping his fingers into the folds of her pocket.

She doesn’t want them to die. She’s just now cracked open the war-dented exoskeleton, peeled back the greatcoat; _hers,_ maybe, sort of. They are the two softest things that she has ever known in the entire universe (softer, even, than they way Finn held her, than the look in Han’s eyes when she matched his cadence word for word), and she does not want them to stray anywhere she might not follow.

Ren tips his head to the side, exposing the long, white column of his throat. She presses the grille of her teeth to the silky skin there immediately, nestling in, remembering instead of biting. Right, she’s learning this.

She thinks, abruptly, of the linens. Of the bedrooms and baths and freshers. Food, nurseries, schools, the fucking scentless, creamy lotion she uses to sooth her boiled skin after she takes her too-hot showers. The First Order, as much as it might tout its severity, is built of human things.

 

She puts a hand on Ren’s face, pressing into the space between his freckled constellations, trying to convey or to show or declare that he’s hers, now. Split wide open on these artificial, grim-grey sheets, found out entirely. He’s terrified, too, and she can feel it.

 

“What are we going to do about Snoke?” she whispers.

  
“We’ll never speak of this again,” he says to the wall, sending vibrations through her jaw, her hand. “You’re going to clean yourself up, and I’m going to — I’m going to put on my robes. And we’ll pass over this like it never happened.”

 

But he’s a liar (they both know this); when she looks to Hux, the general, his eyes say: we are going to war.

 

Perhaps, Rey thinks, moving up to kiss him, they were always too addicted to this gentleness to do anything else.

So Ren trembles. Hux laughs smoke. She sinks her fingers in, deep, deep, and they do not let go.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @ floatin-on-bespin !


End file.
